An interview with Cal McCrystal

Lynne Parker

Lynne Parker

Cal McCrystal has the coolest job in the world; he creates joy and laughter. As well as being a comedy director and physical comedy consultant for the theatre and film industry, his extensive career includes School of Rock on Broadway, One Man, Two Guvnors at The National Theatre, Cirque du Soleil, and films including The Dictator, The World’s End, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Paddington.

Cal

Coming from an acting background and as a graduate of the Ecole Philippe Gaulier Clowning School, Cal’s unique directing skills have become highly sought after. I caught up with him at his London home to chat about his work and how comedians can add physical elements to their acts.

Al Stary: You began your life as an actor, how did your comedy career start?

Cal McCrystal: At drama school I was always trying not to be something, always trying not to be camp or not to be funny. And they always gave me funny parts and I was always furious. ‘Can’t you see my hidden depths?’ Actually, I was never really good at playing anything straight, so to speak. I was never good at that.

Then, when I went into theatre I was happy to get comedy roles. I did a lot of theatre and I enjoyed that. When I did Gaulier he just said, “We like what he’s got, he doesn’t hide his personality when he works.” And I was like “Ah, okay.” Because at drama school they told me I had to hide myself all the time, and that my personality was coming through in all of the roles I played. Gaulier said, “No, that’s good!”

I thought ‘ah, so I can just be myself, can I?’ Which I was kind of doing anyway, but being given permission to do it by someone with his status was great. It was very liberating, actually. He is a marvellous man. I recommend that everyone goes and works with him.

AS: His style of teaching comes across as quite brutal.

CM: He humiliates you in such a funny way that it kind of gives you your clown. The feeling that you have when he says that you’re so bad, the way you feel, you have to kind of hang onto that. Because you think, yeah, this is me at my most vulnerable, at my most stupid, and that’s a really good place to build a clown character from.

AS: What did you learn in those early years of performing physical comedy?

CM: That you learn more from a bad night then you do from a good night. It’s imperative that you do have some good nights, otherwise you just stop doing it. But if you go in, and you’re in a great mood and the audience is in a great mood and they laugh at everything you say, you’re not going to be forced to analyse how you did it. As much as if you’ve got material that you think is strong and they don’t laugh.

But it’s also instinct. I had dinner with James Corden a few weeks ago in New York, and there were these two other guests at dinner that had seen One Man, Two Guvnors. He was describing working with me, and he was telling them there was this one occasion when he used to get this reliable big laugh on this thing and then the laughs stopped coming.

He said, “Can you come and see the show and tell me why I’m not getting a laugh anymore?” And I watched it and said, “Ah, you’re taking your hand off the doorknob in the middle of the sentence, leave your hand on the doorknob until the end of the sentence.”

He said, “What the fuck is that gonna do? That won’t get me the laugh back, that’s nothing.” And I said, “Well, you need to just try it.” So he went on the next performance and he did what I said, got the massive laugh back, and he said to me afterwards, “How the fuck do you know that?”

And the thing is, I don’t know how I know it. But I love being able to do this, I really love it. You get to an age and you just go, I don’t know everything but I know something, and that’s really nice.

AS: What has been your most personally challenging project to date?

CM: Both shows I did at Cirque du Soleil were very challenging. Because it’s such a particular environment. And Cirque have this thing where they say the clowns bring the poetry. I said, “But all your acts bring the poetry, the clowns have got to be funny or they are not clowns.”

So I did two acts which they hated, and they were planning to cut these acts as soon as they opened. And I just kept saying, “listen, I’ll agree with everything you’re saying if the audience agrees with you. But until the audience agrees with you, we don’t know whether they’re going to like it or not. And my instinct says the audience is going to love these numbers. So if I were you I’d let us put this in front of an audience and then you can fire us all.”

So we did the first preview of Varekai with an actual proper audience from Montreal, and we lifted the roof off. And the whole attitude towards me changed after that. “Oh, you are a genius, you are gonna work with us forever. Come back and do another show.”

So I got over that one and then I went back to do another show with them in Las Vegas (Zumanity). But it all started again. I remember I cried for two days at one point. But I thought, you know, I can deal with anything now, having been through all this and survived it. Both shows are still running, and the clowns are getting very good responses from the audience now, 12-13 years later. But that was tough… that was really tough.

AS: In your experience, is there a gender gap in physical comedy and clowning?

CM: I think that there probably are more men in clowning, but in most workshops there is a good percentage of women. Maybe not 50/50, but not too far off. I do find that some women who want to learn clowning want their clown to be a gentle and compassionate creature, and I always encourage clowns to be much more egotistical.

I encourage women to play very competitively with the men. People who say women aren’t as funny, that’s absolute rubbish, of course it is.

AS: What would you like to do more of?

CM: Well, I love working in New York, and I love working at the National. In terms of people, my first go-to would be Spymonkey. I do have also some friends, who I admire hugely, that I work with quite a lot, and I would love to create my own big company for a show.

Of course, my favourite part of the year is coming up. I’m directing Giffords Circus for the fifth time, which is my absolute favourite thing, love working there. We’re doing a Western.

AS: What advice would you give to stand-up comedians who’d like to bring more physicality to their act but find it a bit daunting?

CM: I’ve got a very good answer to that. A game that I play in rehearsals – an exercise – is that I ask each performer to tell us a story without any words. So it’s basically miming, not ‘Marcel Marceau’ miming, we all hate that of course. I’d give them a situation. It might be something tragic. It might be: you come to work in the morning, you sit down, you get a phone call, your house is on fire. You have to race back home, you get there, the door’s locked. You ask a neighbour to go and climb out the window, the firemen arrive, you fancy one of the firemen and then you act it out, whatever it is.

I think that gives you a feeling of being able to express yourself without using any words. And if you do exercises like that every now and again, you’ll find the physical way to express stuff, and you can add that to your stand-up.

Cal is currently Comedy Director for Don Quixote at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and is about to start work on Paddington 2.

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